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the Afro, the Pennsylvania Avenue storeowners were frequently identified as Jews
or Hebrews rather than whites. After the merchants of Pennsylvania Avenue
stopped the mass picketing with their injunction, a wave of anti-Jewish feeling
broke out among movement forces. Juanita Jackson Mitchell once recalled the
reaction of boycott activists at this time: "And if those people didn't say something
about those Jewish merchants. They were the ones who took us to court and
stopped us."^6

The issue here, as in similar situations is complicated. The Jewish
storekeepers in the Black community did practice racial discrimination against
Blacks in their employment practices. But their businesses were only concentrated
in northwest Baltimore because they suffered ethnic discrimination as Jews in other
areas of the city. As a secondary element, difference in religious culture between
Christian Blacks and white Jews was an additional aggravation to ethnic relations;
of all the delays to the appeal hearing over the temporary injunction, the one that
seemed to anger the boycott forces most was the postponement for Passover. Key
elements of the Black freedom movement understood these complications, at least
in hindsight, but any effort that might have been made to oppose the particularly
anti-Jewish sentiments in the movement rank-and-file was made more difficult by
the fact that as the boycott movement had few white allies, it also had few Jewish
allies, even among those progressive Jews who normally supported civil rights
activities. From this point on, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Black-Jewish ethnic
tensions would be a periodically recurring theme as Black freedom movement
advanced."